10 Ways to Build Links to your Website

Links are still one of the best ways to increase traffic and authority status to your website, which will in turn increase your site’s search ranking.

The higher the rating, the more prominent you will be listed on the search engines, the higher the click thru ratio of your optimized title and description, and the more people will stop by your website, creating a snowball effect.

Let’s not forget that there are other great ways for you to build links without buying them and here are 10 of my favorites.

1. People Love Lists & Linkbait : Having a 101 list, a top ten list, or a list of tips for a specific niche category can help generate readers, links and bookmarks.

   Having lists of resources, experts, and other research necessities can attract people looking for more information on your subject.

   When people like your list, they will submit the article to Digg and other social news sites, which results in your site building natural inbound links because the readers of these social bookmarking and news sites tend to blog.

   Kick starting those submissions yourself or asking friends to also helps.

   [Note : Yes, I know I’ve been writing a lot of lists lately, but I’m kinda on vacation, so please I hope this is not overkill.]

2. Get Social Bookmarking! Do not forget the social side of the Internet. On Flickr, pictures of important events, particularly involving the top people in your industry, will generate interest. On YouTube, the same style videos will generate interest, and maybe even make it into the Google Universal Search results.

   Network in the real world with people in your field – network on Facebook or LinkedIn if you don’t have the chance to conduct face to face networking or attend industry conferences.

   Interesting, insightful interviews will also bring in readers. When you have interesting, relevant content, your site will be submitted to Digg and other social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Ma.gnolia.com or AOL’s Propeller, which will give you great links.

3. Blog for Links. Blogs are rapidly gaining in popularity and can help your business website become popular too. The great thing about a blog is the content publishing is instant and so is the recognition. A blog can give your company the freedom to communicate openly, even attracting more links and bookmarks to your blog itself than the homepage, which are stiill good if you market your company and services well on the blog (and link to your homepage from the blog pages… I can’t count the amount of internal blogs I see which link to http://domain.com/blog as the “Home” link in the CMS).

   Search engines have specific fresh bots that seek out new content, especially Google. Start a blog with great content, and the search engine bots will come back to index your site, including your links to and from other blogs.

4. News and Syndication Build Fresh Links : You can syndicate an article or blog post and submit it to good article sites, industry news sites, and other related media outlets : especially those indexed in Google News or Yahoo News (just do a search in these for your niche keywords and “submit”, you may find sites that accet guest articles or opinions. Doing so will generate authority links that boost your website’s standing.

   Take this to the next level by coming up with a press release highlighting new products, services, or upcoming events. Make it sound newsworthy and send it to journalists and bloggers.

   Your RSS feed or blog will also attract natural links, so get them kicking and submit to the top blog & feed directories.

   Keep track of the people who follow the press releases or your articles and offer them exclusives. Writing about companies in the news or doing surveys on hot topics can also help generate interest in your site.

5. Directories Will Help Create Links. Submitting your site to free sites is one way of developing links; however, keep in mind that you should go for quality, not quantity.

   Even creating your own niche directory linked to your website will generate traffic and prestige, especially if you make it useful enough to users and also include other resources amongst original content.

   Look beyond PHP Links and other directory scripts and try building something with Wordpress. Chances are, a directory in your nice with original content and internal pages will do better than a cookie cutter site.

   If you don’t have time to launch or market something of your own, contact a current directory owner about spinning off a niche joint venture (or just submit to the main web directories).

6. Network With Your Local Community. Your own local community can be a source of links. Get a link from your Chamber of Commerce or join the Better Business Bureau. If you have relevant city or state governmental resources, link to them. Other business may be willing to link with you if you are non-competing and in the same field.

   Better yet, donate to local charities which have an online version of their newsletter. A $50 donation can result in a high quality and relevant link from a well linked to non-profit organization or association.

7. Review Products or Businesses. Reviews attract people, especially if you can write about brands that have not been established online.

   Writing reviews on websites like Amazon.com can generate interest in your site if people like you what you have to say. Writing testimonials for products you use can also turn into links from others which find your organic review online.

   A product review may also land your site’s homepage a link from that product’s news room, so don’t always resort to paid reviews as natural ones can be more beneficial in gathering natural linkage.

8. Link Trading Works. Link trading is still a legitimate way to get links. The key to this is to swap with relevant partners and get linked in the content of relevant pages.

   Being just one link on a page full of links will not help your cause, nor will publishing some on-site link farm which is only reachable via some hidden sitemap page.

9. Experts : The Internet loves expertise and becoming an expert on your subject matter will generate interest, which leads to more links.

   Make sure that your content is easy to understand and grammatically correct, but not so “dumbed down” that it seems vague or uninformative.

   You will want to make sure that you keep your information up to date, and that you have information that is not readily available elsewhere. An About Us section and/or Privacy Policy will help lend authority to your site.

10. People Love Contests and Freebies. Spending a little money on a cash prize can save you money on advertising. Free samples, exclusive giveaways, and other items will attract people, and then your content can get them to stay and link.

    Go an extra step to make your contests seasonal… a smoked turkey for Thanksgiving, a product (thinking free iPod) when it launches or a trip to Cancun during its low priced off season.

All in all, the key is to not just buy links, but to create natural link building campaigns to compliment your link advertising. If you spend $1,000 a month buying links, chances are hiring a professional link builder for that same amount will result in a vast and diverse array of incoming links, which stick around permanently.

Help Boost Your Search Engine Rankings

If you are a webmaster, chances are that you already know the huge role that search engine optimisation can make in the success and failure of your business. In this industry it is often said that content is King, and while this may be so there are so many webmasters out there that are also drastically underestimating the importance of title tag optimisation. Actinic SEO makes use of this to optimise your page and boost its rankings.

At this point, you are doing one of two things; either you're nodding your head as if you just learned something or you are wondering what in the world title tag optimisation could possibly be. It sounds complicated but it's really not - it just means making the best of your title tag as far as search engine rankings are concerned. If you don't know already, the title tag is the message or page title that appears in the top left corner of the page on Internet Explorer or another internet browser. Sometimes it contains keywords, sometimes the company name or genre. Failing to make proper use of the title tag is a waste of space on a page, as it can easily be optimised with a good company name and/or slogan and a keyword or two.

It is easy to think that the title tag is one of those things you don't have to bother with but that is not so. The title tag is what shows up in the Search Engine Rankings List and that is often what entices people to click through. By changing your title tag to something catchy and search engine and user friendly you can pick up that much more search engine based traffic which makes your actinic SEO more effective.

If you want a really great title tag, you can make use of the content that you are placing on that page as a guide. If you are managing a wedding site and a page had an article on it about wedding favours, your title tag could say 'Fabulous Wedding Favours for your Tropical Destination Wedding by XYZ Favours Company' or something to that effect. It includes both keywords and the company name and a hint as to what the content of the page is going to be about. Actinic SEO can accomplish this for you.

Don't underestimate the power of title tag optimization to boost your search engine related traffic. This is targeted traffic from people who have a purpose on your site - don't waste it, put Actinic SEO to work.

SEO Sitemaps Give Websites a Boost

A lot of web pages will find an SEO sitemap useful in improving their performance. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, the process that aims to create or revise Internet sites so that it can be better found by search engines. The objective of SEO campaigns is to have websites appear in the top listing or first results page of search engines.

Internet search engines, such as Google and A9, maintain a very large database of Web pages and available files. To do this, they devise a program called a web crawler, or spider. This software automatically and continuously surfs and hunts content in the Web. Pages that the spider finds are retrieved and indexed according to text content, giving more weight to titles and paragraph headers. Spiders never stop navigating the web from page to page, to index the relevant content of the Internet. Besides looking at the text of titles and headers, some programs are able to identify default tags and keep a library of these page keywords or key phrases in the index.

When a user connects to the Internet types a query, which is automatically interpreted as keywords, the search engine scans the saved index and creates a list of web pages that is most appropriate to what the user is searching for.

SEO will use all the combined techniques of keyword analysis, smart code, good content literature, link popularity study and website organization to place the subject web page as high as possible in the list of search results in search engines. Web pages displayed on the top of results pages are assumed to get the most attention, and therefore, opportunity for earnings for web businesses and pages with sponsor links.

Search engines usually return a list of results ranking pages according to the number of Internet sites linked to them. Results can be classified as organic, or sponsored links. Sponsored links are shown prominently because their creators or agents paid the search engine. Sponsored links are the main source of income of search engines. “Organic” search results are the lists of actual results from the engines index and are directly related to the keyword typed in the request.

One of the more effective techniques of SEO is the creation of a well-organized site map in a website. Since the site’s main page and other content are directly linked to a site map, spiders can more easily move through the website, identify the key words of the content, and index these for a search engine. This is where the SEO sitemap helps the website creator or administrator.

Site maps are usually pages filled with links. These are shown as tables or lists, although lists are generally more effective. Writing code for SEO sitemaps is very easy and simple to format and maintain. These are ideally basic HTML pages with default tags, logical titles and keywords scattered in the Meta description. Introduction areas can contain more of the keywords. The site should have a main heading for every directory.

A simple list layout helps reduce unnecessary tags that might “hide” your keywords. Some spiders give more weight to the following, than text in the normal body of the webpage: heading text, content within link elements, text nearer the top of the page and the text written for a link. Therefore, writing the keywords and links in these areas could somehow move up the web page’s ranking. This goes for SEO sitemaps as well.

Web sites should be designed consistently, so navigation models should follow the flow of the site map. Therefore, the first section in the site map should be the first link in the navigation bar.

In an SEO Sitemap, and most pages, the headings contain title attributes where more key phrases in the site map can be added. Keywords are generally well chosen and written in the body of a webpage. However, in an SEO site map with little text, key words should be added as much as possible. As much as possible, web links should follow web page titles, and must undergo SEO during coding. Care must be exercised not to cram the page with keywords and links, or the page will be interpreted as blatant spamming and not receive any traffic at all.

There is no way to guarantee that a website will be shown in the topmost ranking of "organic" search results for an extended period of time. However, smart and responsible SEO sitemap techniques can be used to place the website high up in the search position. Regular monitoring and adjustment of the SEO Sitemap and search results would ensure that a website is kept near the top ranking and receiving lots of web user traffic.